How to promote a small food delivery business

Food delivery is an industry that’s currently experiencing considerable growth. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many restaurants could not allow indoor seating and had to rely on takeaways to continue operating. As a result, many food delivery businesses came into being to fulfil this need. Essentially, this kind of service allows users to order food from restaurants and have it taken to their address directly by the food delivery business. 

This article will help you learn how to promote your food delivery business. We’ll look at a range of different marketing strategies as well as general advice for promoting your business. The topics we’ll cover include:

• Consider your competitors
• Focus on your local audience
• Use high-quality photography
• Advertise on social media
• How Countingup can help manage income from new customers

If you’re only starting out with your food delivery business, you’ll not be able to deliver to anyone, anytime. You’ll need to limit your activities to your local area, so it’s smart to focus your advertising on your local area too.

If you’re trying to promote your business locally, make sure that your marketing content emphasises the benefits your business offers to people nearby. For a food delivery service, this might be extra-fast delivery or cheaper delivery fees.

Another good way to promote your business is to approach local businesses for partnerships directly. Most food delivery businesses make money by establishing a relationship with restaurants so that those restaurants become clients. The delivery business can offer exclusive delivery services for those client restaurants. Instead of waiting for restaurants to approach you, speak to them first, and emphasise the same local benefits you offer to your customers.

You’ve likely researched the competition while creating your business plan, but it’s wise to look into your competitors again when you’re planning out how you’ll promote your food delivery business.

Researching the competition is particularly important for a food delivery business because your competitors have a substantial market share. This means that they receive the majority of the orders placed for food delivery. The primary competitors you’ll have to deal with are Uber Eats, Just Eat, and Deliveroo.

Due to their large market share, these competitors will have a lot more resources than your small food delivery business. Promoting more visibly or creating higher quality marketing content than them will be tough. One of the best ways to beat this disadvantage is to focus on the personal side of your business, which is something they’ll be unable to compete with.

As large, multinational corporations, your competitors will struggle to appear friendly, human and approachable in the same way that you can. As a small business, you can more effectively build a relationship with customers because you can offer a human face for your company. This might come in the form of better customer service, or personal stories on your social media profiles. 

This tactic is most effective when you combine it with your focus on the local area. People will come to trust you much more than your competitors and prefer your services over theirs.

Food-based businesses like cafes, bars, and food delivery businesses benefit immensely from any kind of visual media. Written content is still helpful, but an attractive photo is one of the best ways to sell food to a potential customer.

When you make a website for your food delivery business, make sure you have plenty of images. These don’t need to be pictures of the actual food you’ll be delivering and can instead be food made in the same style or tradition — Italian, Indian, Chinese, and so on. Generic images are handy for promoting different categories of restaurant that you deliver for.

Images specifically of the food from your client restaurants can sometimes be difficult to source, but be sure to check if the restaurant has any marketing images they’re able to share with you. Since this marketing strategy promotes their business as well as yours, they’ll likely be happy to loan their images for use on your website.

Image editing software is a helpful technology that can help small businesses market themselves. If used correctly, you can vastly improve the quality of the images used on your website, making them more attractive to customers. Learning how to use this software can be a worthwhile investment if you frequently use images in your content.

In this modern digital era, it’s essential to use social media for business, especially when promoting your company. Creating a social media profile on any platform is free and fairly easy. The hard part is creating engaging content, but this is the key to a good social media presence.

Engaging content can take many forms, but two good ideas for a food delivery business are videos promoting your business or social media competitions. Videos of food preparation can help advertise the quality of your client restaurants by demonstrating their chefs’ ability. 

Competitions can greatly increase your number of orders and social media followers, but make sure you offer an attractive prize (like a discount on delivery services) so that people take an interest. 

When done right, the above strategies can help attract new customers to your business. New customers mean increased income, which in turn means you might need to put more time into your financial management. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 
Find out more here.